The present disclosure relates to moldable modeling dough, and particularly to water-based moldable modeling dough and a method preparing for the moldable modeling dough.
Generally, there are lots of modeling dough or clay for hand crafting, such as oil-based dough, the dough with filler starch, and the latter lightweight clay with polyvinyl alcohol dough.
The defect of the oil-based dough is non-air-dryable, which is not suitable for some application, for instance, to keep the resulted sculptures well and durable.
The air-dryable with starch-based modeling dough is well-know in the art, such as compositions disclosed by McVicker et al., in U.S. Pat. No. 3,167,440. However, this dough has a tendency to flake, crack, and crumble in both the wet and dry stage, moreover, this dough shrinks substantially upon drying and also the heavy weight character of this dough limits the users in the types of shapes that can be created without the dough falling apart.
Therefore, a desire for lightweight water-based dough was raised. U.S. Pat. No. 5,364,892 introduced that the hollow microsphere can realize the light weight dough. The resulting dough has the improved properties of durable, elastic, small tendency to crack and smaller volume shrinkage upon drying etc. However, the invention employed the gellant, borax, or some other boron containing chemicals, and this chemical may be acutely toxic if ingested, hence it may not suitable for children.
To get dough without boron containing gellant, U.S. Pat. No. 6,444,728 used the polyethylene oxide (PEO) to improve the plasticity and ductility when it was molded, and also to reduce the stickiness of dough to the hands of users. The dough was non-sticky, excellent in ductility, surface smoothness, shape preservation, hand feeling, and workability. However, the PEO is costly.